Late to the party since I don't come on this site much at all, but wanted to respond to some things mentioned about me/Ashita.
(I am the lead developer of Ashita.)
so just like any ffxi related project the reason is as follows:
generally they don't think they would get support from the community once the old project(in this case guildwork) is fixed by the absentee parents that maintain them because people prefer to stick with what they know.
to put it simply, and to give you a real world example.. someone could make a complete guildwork replacement and some people might use it, but most wouldn't, and the ones who do some would switch back to guildwork once guildwork is fixed.
you can look at this example with windower/ashita. the windower team is very absentee. out of the people who have worked on the project and the main core very few of them pay any attention to ffxi at all. generally they only fix things when people *** excessively and that's why windower 5 has been in the pipes for decade. meanwhile, ashita is ran by people who still are invested in FFXIs interest in some shape or form but the vast majority of people still stick with windower.
tldr blame yourself
I'm not sure what you are trying to imply here, but the whole idea of 'X' project cares more than 'Y' is a bit of a stretch. Ashita and Windower are not at war or see each other as a competing platform. We are both free and welcome anyone to use our stuff. There has always been some weird player-driven 'hate' between the projects that made people think we hate each other. We don't. There isn't any ill-will or bad blood between us at all.
As for my 'invested interest' into FFXI. Something a lot of people don't know is that I don't play the game. I haven't for years. I quit back before Abyssea came out. I came back for 1 month towards the end of Abyssea and quit again. Then came back for about 2-3 months about 2 years ago and quit again. I hate retail. I have no interest in it at all. I just work on Ashita/FFXI because it has been something I've loved for years and have done since I started playing the game originally. But to say I have a bigger interest in it than Windowers team is a huge stretch and not really accurate at all.
nah, unfortunately i've known most of your core devs(and guildworkds) throughout their cycles of inactivity. the majority of support is done by randos in the community.
bonkers that there are people willing to publicly post POCs(which they probably made relatively quickly) of things you guys can't fix in months. wild isn't it? but we'll take your word you're working on it
pearl clutching goblins
edit: may seem that i'm being harsh but this problem is very very simple. if you don't have the time or passion to handle a project don't take it on. pass it off to someone who wants to work on it. if you've worked at any company ever you should understand this concept :). pretending you're some altruistic do gooder who spends 2 hours a year on ffxi is not impressing anyone
It's easy for you, as a player, to sit and assume how something works and just ***on the work of others when something breaks. This is often why a lot of open source, freeware, etc. developers get burnt out and leave. Guildwork is not just the plugin that either project, Ashita or Windower, has. The plugin actually does close to nothing. It simply downloads the current Guildwork.exe, and forwards some data to it. The Guildwork.exe maintains the rest of the data handling that is read from the client memory. However, this is not even close to any of the real guts of what makes Guildwork exist/work. All the data handling/processing is done on the server end, which the Guildwork.exe sends back to.
Ashita and Windower's teams have access to the plugin's source, and the Guildwork.exe source (python). We do not have access to the website side of things. (At least I am not aware of anyone but a small set of people in the past having any access to it, none of which were devs for either project.) At this time, as far as I know, only Rooks and one other person have access to the server/site side of things.
Fixing the plugin and exe isn't a big deal, and getting the exe updated and uploaded to be downloaded is a matter of just getting Rooks to deal with whoever is in charge of the aws instance now. But any actual site-sided processing and other related handling that is broken needs to be handled by Rooks or whoever else actually has access to the website side.
This isn't a matter of us not caring or bothering to fix it. It's simply that we can't fix the main problems.
Either way the solution is simple. Pass the project off to people who care.
The issue with this is that Scraggs won't.
Recreating FFXIAH isn't exactly rocket science either though, but it's a matter of no one being interested in investing the time and resources into doing it now this late into the game. Connecting to the AH servers as a headless client and dumping history is extremely easy to do.
i brought windower up to reference a relatively abandoned project that people stick to instead of embracing a newer more active project(ashita), albeit not as abandoned as ffxiah/guildwork.
Windower is far from abandoned lol..
Phoenix.Enochroot said:
»I'm an oldschool windower user so based on tsm's post I went to look at ashita and what they're up to these days. Seems pretty disorganized. Changelog last updated 3 years ago. Wiki last updated 4 years ago. Github issue tracker with all of 2 issues in it. Poking around a bit more, found the self-hosted git repo and that at least looks current.
Our resources are a bit scattered, which will be addressed when Ashita v4 is finalized and released. Things mainly happened in a manner that caused me to lose time over the years and not be able to sink it into the lesser parts of the project (ie. docs) which hardly anyone ever reads anyway. It's easier to just help/walk someone through things on Discord at this point than to worry about a docs page being available for every little detail.
Our wiki(s) are 'locked' and no longer used and mostly just kept for a previous reference point. The changelog happens on Discord now as well since we plan to move [nearly] entirely off of having a website besides a landing page when v4 is released as well. Our GitHub tracker is not used yet as our Git handling has been done on personal hosting rather than using GitHub due to how we coded our launcher years ago for auto-updates. GitHub did not allow the setup we were needing at the time so we opt'd to host ourselves. So most of the things you listed are just not actually used or being discontinued in the somewhat near future.
Going forward though, v4 will be on GitHub entirely as the platform has greatly improved since we originally first wrote our launcher that had auto-updates.
If anyone is interested in Ashita, you can find us/our changelog and any other info in regards to Ashita on Discord here: https://discord.gg/Ashita